The Complete Stories

by Noah Warren

The Complete Stories announces its desire and its lie in the title; this is a book of shatter and loss. In his second collection, Noah Warren―previously selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets―unravels histories both personal and public, picking apart their ugliness, beauty, and irreducible singularity. Clothed in broken forms, these poems of grieving and tentative joy ask finally how we can go forward with our own mottled pasts, into the futures we can’t predict but for which we must bear responsibility.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published May 18, 2021

About the author

Noah was born in Nova Scotia and graduated from Yale. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Poetry, Agni, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships from Yale University, the James Merrill House, and Stanford University, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He lives in Palo Alto.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“One June he packed his tools and drove to a shack / in Canada. A tremendous lightness: / time fell apart.” I love the phrase “tremendous lightness” when it comes to the work of Noah Warren, whose second collection of poetry, The Complete Stories, is brimming with such cannily, carefully written poems that land so lightly on the ears, but settle in hard + heavy on the inner fibre of being. There is a superb musicality at work, his rhythms dancing over and around the more immoveable objects of the mind: “Snake, / I wish I wasn’t afraid. / I wish I didn’t have / to grope through shame.” Here are poems where people are “unfree as the flowering pear trees”, poems of the “hours I refuse to remember / that hardened into the low city I walked out into, already retreating from me”, as Warren writes in ‘Buildings’, my personal favourite from the collection. There is also a clever construction of self, history, memory: ‘Novel’, ‘Abstract, Bio, Headshot’ and both iterations of ‘The Complete Stories’ play with, challenge ideas of, narrative + meaning. There’s the quiet intensity of ‘Hermit Thrush’, the striking originality of ‘Allegiances’ and ‘A New Landscape’; there’s an abundance of grief, longing, regret; and the past, as fallible a structure as any other: “That year our house is finished. Unsalable, / the rock on which some other marriage / foundered, it had lain skeletal through a winter: / foundation, frame, plans, and tarps of lumber.”

[Davide · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lily puts it well in "The Complete Stories": "Well I don't think how you read matters half so much as how you write."

Warren's obviously a brilliant person and there's a generic stylishness to the lyricism of these poems that I'm compelled by, but the voice is sunken by a governing pretentiousness and the poems broadly veer treacly, unambitious, and perilously overwritten. The book feels either incomplete (ironically), as if its instigating ambitions were not fully realized or only half-heartedly executed, or of the sort that was written without urgency, filling no deeper need.

[Aldo · Rating 1 out of 5]

The emperor wears no clothes. That’s the only way I can describe how this drivel gets published. I saw Warren read with another (incredible!) poet recently who had the audience in the palm of her hand. Her work was electric. Then he got up. Read something about trees or sheds. My girlfriend fell asleep. It was trite. Cliche after cliche. He’s very well connected and married to another famous poet. We need to be honest about most poetry right now: it’s awful and the emperor has no clothes. Warren is evidence of this.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A promising voice for years to come. Attentive, able to risk form to capture meaning.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

These “stories” hardly seem complete, given the eclectic snippets of beautiful observations and cryptic excerpts from a story here and a novel there, plus the occasional poem, such as this haiku in the middle of “Cup of Snow”:

“in the stone garden:
the carp fountain garbles
its frilled vowel”

The sound of one hand clapping.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Novel" [Who lies by the lake...] / "Letter" / "Notes on the Mystery" / "The Complete Stories" [Skirt leaves gone orange...]